Based On Their Bar Tab, The Founding Fathers Were Hungover AF When Signing The Constitution

Brian Dunlop

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When the Founding Fathers went out to drink, they did not come to play! Seriously, in one night, they could consume enough alcohol to get a small village drunk. History has shown us that these revolutionary men decked out in white powdered wigs were definitely heavy drinkers when it comes to a night out on the town.

What kind of history am I bringing up? That show Drunk History on Comedy Central? Well, no, not that. Our claim to this drunken fact comes in the form of an infamous bar tab. This huge tab shows us the insane amount of alcohol consumption going down just days before the signing of the US Constitution.

To say the Founding Fathers were hammered would be an understatement. Just a couple days before the signing of one of the most important documents in our nation’s history, 55 delegates were out at the bar getting absolutely wasted! It’s a good and responsible thing that our founders cared so much about getting drunk that they’d keep record of this tab (probably for bragging rights). If people didn’t like to keep track of their outrageous bar tabs then this would all be lost to history. How much did they drink, you ask?

The Huffington Post reports, “In 1787, two days before they signed off on the Constitution, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention partied at a tavern. According to the bill preserved from the evening, they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer and seven bowls of alcoholic punch. That’s more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a few shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate.”

That’s a whole lot of drink! Damn, they were really sauced up, weren’t they? Well, according to the Huffington Post article, in colonial America, the average person would consume much more alcohol on a daily basis than the average person of today. Getting hammered was much more acceptable then if you knew how to hold your weight. But still, this is an insane tab. They must have been fumbling and stumbling out of that bar when they were finished. I can only imagine the pounding headache they woke up to, which may have accompanied the signing of the Constitution.

This historic tab even puts the utterly-ridiculous Dallas Cowboys bar tab to shame. The founding fathers proved that they can party harder than professional football players. Damn, I can only imagine that night in 1787, where 55 delegates got totally trashed.